Event Structure and Diachronic Change in Chinese: A Morpho-syntactic Study

该项目主要研究汉语动词系统的形态句法及其在中古汉语中的重大历时变化。我们认为，一些句法变化可以归因于动词领域中形态标记的丧失。古代汉语是否有形态变化以及在多大程度上有形态变化是一个有争议的问题；既有丰富的词缀系统(Sagart 1999)，也有缺乏形态变化(Zádrapa 2011)的假设。考虑到汉语在上古末期和中古早期经历了巨大的句法变化，以及由于词缀的丧失而导致的声调的同时发展，似乎至少有一部分句法变化是由不透明和/或失去原有形态所引发的。从跨语言角度看，词法缺失导致的句法变化是一个被充分证明的过程(Roberts and Roussou，2003，McFadden 2015 for Indo-European Languages，Saxena 1997 for藏语)，我们将证明这一过程也可以假设为汉语。在早期的工作中，我们提出古汉语的动词形态被置于一个与VP的体结构相连的分裂VP中，而不是像Unger(1983)和金(2006)所假设的那样标记完成体或不完成体，它的缺失是汉语从更综合的语言向更分析的语言转变的触发因素之一(Meisternst 2016,2019，Aldridge and Meisternst 2018)。这个项目的目的是为我们之前的提议提供基于证据的句法论证，并得到包括历史音韵学和词法研究在内的语料库的支持；即该项目将有助于最近在汉语历史形态学背景下对历时句法的跨语言研究(例如Roberts和Roussou 2003，Van Gelderen 2011)。作为汉语历史音韵学语言文献中争议最少、讨论最多的词缀，我们将重点考察*-S后缀的功能。以往的研究大多集中在汉语的历史形态上，主要是对动词的词汇语义进行考察。我们的项目将在句法框架内检验现有形态音系研究的结果；将在预先定义的句法测试的基础上系统地检查形态音系重构的有效性，以便从跨语言的角度对动词的固有体结构进行分类。这是中国历史语言学的一种全新的创新方法，它将历史形态音系学与最近对历时句法的跨语言研究结合在一起。

The project focuses on the morpho-syntax of the Chinese verbal system and its substantial diachronic changes in Middle Chinese. We will argue that a number of syntactic changes can be attributed to the loss of morphological marking in the verbal domain. The question whether and to which extent Archaic Chinese had morphological alternations is a debated issue; both a rich system of affixation (Sagart 1999) and the lack of morphological alternations (Zádrapa 2011) have been assumed. Considering the substantial syntactic changes Chinese underwent at the end of the Late Archaic and in the Early Middle Chinese periods, together with the concurrent development of tones due to the loss of affixation, it seems likely that at least some of the syntactic changes were triggered by opacity and/or loss of former morphology. Syntactic change due to loss of morphology is a well attested process cross-linguistically (Roberts and Roussou, 2003, McFadden 2015 for Indo-European languages, Saxena 1997 for Tibetan), and we will demonstrate that this process can also be assumed for Chinese. In earlier work, we proposed that the verbal morphology reconstructed for Archaic Chinese was hosted in a split VP connected to the internal aspectual structure of VP, instead of marking perfective or imperfective aspect, as has been assumed e.g. in Unger (1983), and Jin (2006), and that its loss was one of the triggers for a change of Chinese from a more synthetic to a more analytic language (Meisterernst 2016, 2019, Aldridge and Meisterernst 2018). The purpose of this project is to provide evidence-based syntactic arguments for our earlier proposal supported by a corpus of data which includes previous research on historical phonology and morphology; i.e. the project will contribute to recent cross-linguistic research on diachronic syntax (e.g. Roberts and Roussou 2003, Van Gelderen 2011) within the context of Chinese Historical Morphology. We will particularly focus on the functions of the suffix *-s, as the least controversial and most discussed affix in the linguistic literature on the Chinese historical morpho-phonology. Previous research mostly concentrated on the Historical Morphology of Chinese, predominantly not going beyond the investigation of the lexical semantics of the verbs. Our project will test the results of the existing morpho-phonological research within a syntactic framework; the validity of the morpho-phonological reconstructions will be checked systematically on the basis of syntactic tests pre-defined for the classification of the intrinsic aspectual structure of verbs cross-linguistically. This is an entirely innovative approach for Chinese Historical Linguistics, which joins historical morpho-phonology with recent cross-linguistic research on diachronic syntax.